Faking Subpixel Antialiasing on Text with Core Animation

Question

For anyone working on a project with Core Animation layer-backed views, it\'s unfortunately obvious that subpixel antialiasing (text smoothing) is disabled for text not rend

Answer 1

If you are simply trying to get sharp looking text to display on an opaque background and hitting your head against the wall with CATextLayer - give up and use NSTextField with the inset disabled and linefragmentpadding set to 0. Sample code is swift but you should be able to translate easily...

var testV = NSTextView()
testV.backgroundColor = NSColor(calibratedRed: 0.73, green: 0.84, blue: 0.89, alpha: 1)
testV.frame = CGRectMake(120.0, 100.0, 200.0, 30.0)
testV.string = "Hello World!"
testV.textContainerInset = NSZeroSize
testV.textContainer!.lineFragmentPadding = 0
self.addSubview(testV)

for me displays text the equivalent to:

var testL = CATextLayer()
testL.backgroundColor = NSColor(calibratedRed: 0.73, green: 0.84, blue: 0.89, alpha: 1).CGColor
testL.bounds = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 200.0, 30.0)
testL.position = CGPointMake(100.0, 100.0)
testL.string = "Hello World!"
testL.fontSize = 14
testL.foregroundColor = NSColor.blackColor().CGColor
self.layer!.addSublayer(testL)

This class obviously comes with more overhead and possibly unnecessary things like text selecting/copying etc, but hey the text displays well.